I keep thinking of various planetary system configurations, and would like to know:
What are the fundamental references based on Monte Carlo long-term simulation of planetary systems' evolution that ...

What is the method to determine the amount of reflected starlight necessary for an exoplanet to be visible from a given distance/angle? (Not from occlusion but actually visible on its own.) Further, ...

Mathematicians much more often use radii over diameters when discussing about circles and spheres, because in mathematics the radius is more fundamental than the diameter (the sphere is defined using ...

I have read that immensley powerful telescopes such as the European Extremley Large Telescope will be able to directly image the atmospheres of exoplanets, and even determine their rotation rates.
I ...

Could we detect an earth-like planet (e.g. similar distance from star, and similar size) with current planet finding techniques? If an earth-like planet were orbiting our nearest star, excluding the ...

After yesterday's announcement of the Kepler telescope finding a huge amount of newly observed exoplanets, i saw a headline claiming that as much as 22% of sun like stars in the universe have planets ...

Recently, I encountered the concept of carbon planets - planets, which would be, unlike the Earth, formed mostly by carbon, instead of oxygen, silicon and magnesium. (I am not counting iron, which is ...

I was given an exoplanet similar in size and distance to host star to our own earth. It's orbiting a star with luminosity six times our sun, the greenhouse coefficient 0.3, bond albedo 0.3.
I need to ...

There are several ways we are coming closer to answering the question "is there life elsewhere in the universe?". One is by first understanding very well the origin life on our own planet. Another is ...

According to recent news, Kepler-444, a 11.2 billion year old star, has a system of five planets. It has a mass of 3/4 of solar mass. So I believe both Kepler 444 and the Sun will share the fate of ...

My guess is that life bearing planets are too far apart to be detected. I think we can only find the ones within a sphere around our planet that is 100s of light years in diameter but I suspect life ...

The surface gravities of the Sun’s planets are all close to 1g, 0.38-2.53 (about a factor of e, by chance). The cloud-top gravity of the gas giants is not too interesting here, but I suppose that the ...

In the National Geographic article about NASA's announcement of new planets discovered by the Kepler spacecraft, it states that there are 4,175 candidate planets. What is the process for vetting these ...

Current and upcoming telescopes which find exoplanets and take spectra of their atmospheres seem to be optical or infrared. What about radio telescopes applied to exoplanets? They are larger and more ...

Recently, I got around to seeing the movie Interstellar. In it, the characters of the movie visit a stellar system that appears to be built around a black hole instead of a star. On top of this, their ...

Obviously, I am not referring to actual viewing of the exoplanets themselves, but detecting their effects on the brightness of the light emitted from the parent star (as in the diagram below from The ...

I have heard that the only planets able to be seen outside the Solar system are Jovian-sized planets with the occasional detection of planets three times the Earth's size. But, as far as I know, we ...

Would an Earth analog exoplanet which rotates around a solar analog, but without axial tilt, have no seasons?
Would it be similar to how Los Angeles does not have very noticeable seasons compared to ...

Suppose there is a tidally locked planet orbiting a star. The planet's surface consists of a global ocean, that is, liquid water. At the inner hemisphere the temperature is so high that the water is ...

Alpha Centauri Bb is an exoplanet orbiting Alpha Centauri B. It is asserted that given the close distance to the star the planet should be tidally locked.
The orbiting period of the planet is about ...

Often I see news articles claiming astronomers found exoplanets with water. If we are capable of detecting water on such distant objects, why don't we employ similar methods to find water on Mars or ...

Hot Jupiters are close to their parent star - after all, that's why they're so hot. Their atmospheres are thought to be slowly blown away by the parent star, and they will eventually become chthonian ...

At present, it seems like we are alone in our solar system. How many earth-like planets would fit into the habitable zone of the solar system?
The orbits should be stable for quite a time, i.e. for ...

I'm reading many of the Wikipedia pages about exoplanets and the different methods they are using to detect them. But I wonder, it seems that the emphasis is on detecting and finding new exoplanets, ...

Two Questions:
1) Are rogue planets in motion, i.e. are they just wandering freely in space or stationary?
1) Do rogue planets have defined path or a one which can be anticipated? I understand that ...

I'm trying to imagine what a hypothetical observer on the surface of Alpha Centauri Bb would see in the daytime sky. I know it would vary depending on the orbit of b around B, as well as the position ...

On Venus, there is really inhospitable weather, as well as within the gas giants in our solar system. Are there examples of even more extreme weather on planets found in other solar systems than ours?
...

Do galaxies have habitable zones the same as stars do? Say in a galaxy with a very active nucleus producing a lot of heat and radiation, would there be a point at which no star's planets could harbor ...

Within a year now it has been decided to launch TESS in 2017 and PLATO in 2024, space telecopes of NASA and ESA. They seem to have very similar science goals, both searching for transiting Earth sized ...

Question: Which is the average or maximum speed of a telematically sent message that a space probe can send? Is as simple as radio waves travel at the speed of light in a vacuum?
Context: I have been ...

Since Neptune/Uranus have high percentages of methane, wouldn't it be highly likely that there will be combustion (triggered by the lightning storms or any other factor) if oxygen was abundant?
And ...